During the creation of tables using mysql on phpmyadmin, I always find an issue when it comes to primary keys and their auto-increments. When I insert lines into my table. The auto_increment works perfectly adding a value of 1 to each primary key on each new line. But when I delete a line for example a line where the primary key is 'id = 4' and I add a new line to the table. The primary key in the new line gets a value of 'id = 5' instead of 'id = 4'. It acts like the old line was never deleted.
Here is an example of the SQL statement:
CREATE TABLE employe(
id INT UNSIGNED PRIMARY KEY AUTO_INCREMENT,
name VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL
)
ENGINE = INNODB;
How do I find a solution to this problem ?
Thank you.
I'm pretty sure this is by design. If you had IDs up to 6 in your table and you deleted ID 2, would you want the next input to be an ID of 2? That doesn't seem to follow the ACID properties. Also, if there was a dependence on that data, for example, if it was user data, and the ID determined user IDs, it would invalidate pre-existing information, since if user X was deleted and the same ID was assigned to user Y, that could cause integrity issues in dependent systems.
Also, imagine a table with 50 billion rows. Should the table run an O(n) search for the smallest missing ID every time you're trying to insert a new record? I can see that getting out of hand really quickly.
Some links you might like to read:
Principles of Transaction-Oriented Database Recovery (1983)
How can we re-use the deleted id from any MySQL-DB table?
Why do you care?
Primary keys are internal row identifiers that are not supposed to be sexy or good looking. As long as they are able identify each row uniquely, they serve their purpose.
Now, if you care about its value, then you probably want to expose the primary key value somewhere, and that's a big red flag. If you need an external, visible identifier, you can create a secondary column with any formatting sequence and values you want.
As a side note, the term AUTO_INCREMENT is a bit misleading. It doesn't really mean they increase one by one all the time. It just mean it will try to produce sequential numbers, as long as it is possible. In multi-threaded apps that's usually not possible since batches or numbers are reserved per thread so the row insertion sequence may end actually not following the natural numbering. Row deletions have a similar effect, as well as INSERT with roll backs.
Primary keys are meant to be used for joining tables together and
indexing, they are not meant to be used for human usage. Reordering
primary key columns could orphan data and wreck havoc to your queries.
Tips: Add another column to your table and reorder that column to your will if needed (show that column to your user instead of the primary key).
Related
I want to structure a MySQL table with many of the the usual columns such as index as an integer, name as a varchar, etc. The thing about this table is I want to include a column that has an unknown number of entries. I think the best way to do this (if possible) is to make one of the columns an array that can be changed as any entry in a database can. Supposing when the record is created it has 0 entries. Then later, I want to add 1 or more. Maybe sometime later still, I might want to remove 1 or more of these entries.
I know I could create the table with individual columns for each of these additions, but I may want as many as a hundred or more for one record. This seems very inefficient and very difficult to maintain. So the bottom-line question is can a column be defined as a dynamic array? If so, how? How can things be selectively added to or removed from it?
I'll take a stab in the dark and guess maybe make a table contain another table. I've never heard of this because my experience with MySQL has been mostly casual. I make databases and dynamic websites because I want to.
The way to do this in a relational database is to create another table. One column of that table will have a foreign key pointing to the primary key of that table that should have had the array (or multiple columns, if the primary key consists of more than one row). Another column has the values that'd be found in the array. If order matters, a third column would store some other values indicating the ordinality.
Something along the lines of:
CREATE TABLE elbat_array
(id integer,
elbat integer -- or whatever type the primary key column has
NOT NULL,
value text, -- or whatever type the values should have
ordinality integer
NOT NULL, -- optional
PRIMARY KEY (id),
FOREIGN KEY (elbat)
REFERENCES elbat -- the other table
(id) -- and its primary key column
ON DELETE CASCADE,
UNIQUE (ordinality));
To add to the "array", insert rows into that table. To remove, delete rows. There can be as many as zero rows (i.e. "array" elements) or as much as there's disk space (unless you hit any limit of the DBMS before, but if such a limit applies it would be very large, so usually that should not be a problem).
Also worth a read in that context: "Is storing a delimited list in a database column really that bad?" While it's not about an array type in particular, on the meta level it discusses why the values in a column should be atomic. An array would violate that as well as a delimited list does.
There is a table. No PK, 2 FK, with some arbitrary number of columns.
Unfortunately FK are not unique in any way.
Adding new data is easy.
Deleting data (finding a row) is ok if I put unique constraint to some other col.
(DELETE ... WHERE fk1=:fk1 AND fk2=:fk2 AND ucol=:ucol)
What to do with UPDATE?
I cant use that ucol because that same ucol might be subject of change. I have several solutions, but none of them seem ok.
Solution1:
Put PK in table. Use it for DELETE and UPDATE. Deleting will make lot of holes in it but that's no problem. In theory, it can run out of PK numbers (int, unsigned int) if there's some heavy deleting going on.
Solution1a
Make CK of (fk1, fk2, some new col) use that to locate the row. It's the same as just using the PK.
Solution2
Use timestamp with microtime/ hash/ unique key generator/ something to populate new unique col. That col is used as PK to locate the row for UPDATE and DELETE. Excellent only if unique algo does it's job perfectly.
My question:
Is there something better? That doesn't require fancy algorithms and have no risk of overflowing auto-incremented PK...
----------------- edit----------------
Solution2a
Use mysql UUID! It's far better (and easier to use) than, creating custom timestamp / hash / something_unique.
As per my suggestion , it will be better to add a PK to the table because of following reasons:
1. It will give unique id to each row , which will help in DELETE and UPDATE script.
2. PK will create a cluster index on the column which will improve performace of the table while retriving data.
3. Its always adviced to provide a PK in each table.
4. In future you can use the PK as a FK in any table if required.
I have a table that does not require a primary key. It consists of 4 columns which are email,date,time,message. Each time a user logs in, logs out, or does any particular action that is important, I log the email, date, time and action (message). Currently the table is setup with email as the Primary Key but I am unable to insert more than one record with the same email. I suppose I could use time as the PK but there is the possibility that two actions fall on the same time. How can I just use the table without a PK? I have tried turning it off for the email column but it does not allow me to.
Yes as you have defined email field as your primary, it can hold unique data only and no duplication allowed.
So you have two options:
1: Remove email field as a primary key
2: Add new integer field as a Primary key with auto increment (I would prefer this one)
You could use a natural primary key that would be a combination of Email + Date + Time + Action. That combination would be unique. It is impossible for the same user to do 2 different actions at the same time. That will help you to keep integrity of your information.
Hope this helps you.
To make a decision on a table' primary key one may start with considering these points (applicable to innodb):
How the data is going to be accessed after it is written (if you don't query it, why store it?). If you care about read performance you should query your data by the primary key, since for innodb primary key is the only possible clustered index.
The data is stored ordered by the primary key, so if you care about write performance, you should write data ideally ordered by your primary key, which always happens automatically if you have an auto_increment. Also table for which you don't explicitly specify a primary key are going to have a hidden auto_increment field which you won't be able to access, i.e. you get less for the same cost.
I have an existing schema with a non-auto-incrementing primary key. The key is used as a foreign key in a dozen other tables.
I have inherited a program with major performance problems. Currently, when a new row is added to this table, this is how a new unique id is created:
1) a query for all existing primary key values is retrieved
2) a random number is generated
3) if the number does not exist in the retrieved values, use it, otherwise goto (2)
The app is multi-threaded and multi-server, so simply grabbing the existing ids once at startup isn't an option. I do not have unique information from the initiating request to grab and convert into a pseudo-unique value (like a member id).
I understand it is theoretically possible to perform surgery on the internals to add autoincrementing to an existing primary key. I understand it would also be possible to systematically drop all foreign keys pointing to this table, then create-rename-insert a new version of the table, then add back foreign keys, but this table format is dictated by a third-party app and if I mess this up then Bad Things happen.
Is there a way to leverage sql/mysql to come up with unique row values?
The closest I have come up with is choosing a number randomly from a large space and hoping it is unique in the database, then retrying when the odd collision occurs.
Ideas?
If the table has a primary key that isn't being used for foreign key references, then drop that primary key. The goal is to make your column an auto-incremented primary key.
So, look for the maximum value and then the following should do what you want:
alter table t modify id int not null auto_increment primary key;
alter table t auto_increment = <maximum value> + 1;
I don't think it is necessary to explicitly set the auto_increment value, but I like to be sure.
I think you can SELECT MAX('strange-id-column')+1. That value will be unique and you can put that sql code inside a transaction with the INSERT code in order to prevent errors.
It seems really expensive to pull back a list of all primary key values (for large sets), and then to generate psuedo-random value and verify it's unique, by checking it against the list.
One of the big problems I see with this approach is that a pseudo-random number generator will generate the same sequence of values, when the sequence is started with the same seed value.
If that ever happens, then there will be collision after collision after collision until the sequence reaches a value that hasn't yet been used. And the next time it happens, you'd spin through that whole list again, to add one more value.
I don't understand why the value has to be random.
If there's not a requirement for pseudo-randomness, and an ascending value would be okay, here's what I would do if I didn't want to make any changes to the existing table:
I'd create another "id-generator" table that has an auto_increment column. I perform inserts to that table to generate id values.
Instead of running a query to pull back all existing id values from the existing table, I'd instead perform an INSERT into the "id-generator" table, and then a SELECT LAST_INSERT_ID() to retrieve the id of the row I just inserted, and that would use that as "generated" id value.
Basically, emulating an Oracle SEQUENCE object. It wouldn't be necessary to keep all of the rows in "id-generator" table. So, I could perform a DELETE of all rows that have an id value less than the maximum id value.
If there is a requirement for pseudo-randomness (shudder) I'd probably just attempt the INSERT as a way to find out if the key exists or not. If the insert fails due to a duplicate key, I'd try again with a different id value.
The repeated sequence from a pseudo-random generator scares me... if I got several collisions in a row... are these from a previously used sequence, or are they values from a different sequence. I don't have any way of knowing. Abandoning the sequence and restarting with a new seed, if that seed has been used before, I'm off chasing another series of previously generated values.
For low levels of concurrency (average concurrent ongoing inserts < 1) You can use optimistic locking to achieve a unique id without autoincrement:
set up a one-row table for this function, eg:
create table last_id (last_id bigint not null default 0);
To get your next id, retrieve this value in your app code, apply your newId function, and then attempt to update the value, eg:
select last_id from last_id; // In DB
newId = lastId + 1 // In app code
update last_id set last_id=$newId where last_id=$lastId // In DB
Check the number of rows that were updated. If it was 0, another server beat you to it and you should return to step 1.
How to rearrange primary key column values after deleting some rows from a table in MySQL?
Foe example; a table with 4 row of data with primary key values 1,2,3,4. When delete 2nd and 3rd rows, then the key value of 4th row change to 2.
Please help me to find solution.
Why do this? You don't need to rearrange your key since it's only number, identifier for record. It has no actual meaning - so let DBMS handle that. This is a very common mistake - trying to take DBMS role.
However, I'll answer your question for common case. In MySQL you can rearrange column with:
update t cross join (select #cur:=0) as init set t.col=#cur:=#cur+1
-this, however, can't be used with column under UNIQUE (so primary key as well) restriction since during update you'll possibly get duplicate records. You should drop restriction first before do that (and create it again after update).
One method is THIS ONE.
Other then that, you can simply drop the table which is primary and then again create it. This will do the job
Why do you want to change primary keys for your data? In general this is bad idea to do that, especially when integrity contstraints comes into the game. If you need to do such thing, I would say you have bad DB desing and you should take closer look on that aspect.